Case Study: Death Wish Coffee achieves $2,083 a minute in sales with Shopify

How Death Wish Coffee Made $2,083 a Minute by Winning the Super Bowl

Death Wish Coffee, founded by Mike Brown, grew from a struggling upstate New York shop into a fast‑rising national brand—but a 2013 Good Morning America feature crashed its patchwork website, stranded orders, and damaged its reputation. Facing the prospect of massive traffic spikes (most notably after winning a free Super Bowl commercial), the company needed a scalable e‑commerce and operations platform to prevent outages and restore customer trust.

Death Wish replatformed to Shopify Plus and implemented Skubana for centralized inventory, forecasting, and automated purchase orders, preventing oversells and consolidating data across warehouses and sales channels. The result: the site handled 150,000 visitors during the Super Bowl push and produced $250,000 in two hours (about $2,083 per minute), while the company continued 200% year‑over‑year growth, built recurring subscription revenue, landed placement in 250 Safeway stores, and earned roughly half a billion media impressions.

Death Wish Coffee

Mike Brown

Founder